5 strategies to embrace in a press release

When crafting marketing material, it's easy to become immersed in your company's latest announcement while forgetting that in reality, most people don't share your vested interest. A well-worded, dynamic press release can deliver your employer or client's new product, message or initiative to its target audience. Here are five tips for hooking reporters with your release:

• Boost your headline efficiency. Let's start at the very beginning. Hannah Fleishman of Hubspot recommends packing your headline with the most concise, engaging economy of words to demand attention. Active verbs can spell the difference between lukewarm copy and boiling hot news.
• Brief is best. "Keep it short, keep it clean. Journalists read a ton of emailed press releases. If it's two pages, it'll cause eyes to glaze over. Write succinctly and then give us the contact info," Andy Ashby of the Memphis Business Journal told the Raven Blog.
• Remember the inverted pyramid. Front-load information at the beginning of your release. Strong, information-rich sentences make the best quotes for journalists, and should be easy to find. Anything beyond the first few paragraphs may be cut, so prioritize vertically.
• Think beyond the written word. More and more, media outlets are looking for stories they can package across print and multimedia. Pitch topical press releases to podcasts, vodcasts and outlets that produce visualizations like infographics. Tell the story of your announcement in a way that lends itself to a catchy visual, and attach in-house multimedia collateral.
• Write to get noticed. Journalists come across hundreds of press releases each month, so yours needs to stand out. Writing a personalized note to your contact and dropping your release during a timely news window can help a release reach the top of the heap.

Whether your home base is a virtual office in Tampa or a brick and mortar headquarters, these tips will give your press release a competitive edge.